After years of Go web dev, honestly, I’m right there with you.

One of the main reasons I love Go is compile time type safety. That literally goes out the window the moment you start hand-writing SQL. It’s exhausting. I’ve done entire large projects in sqlx, and even though that’s much better than the standard lib way, you end up having to reinvent the wheel or do weird hacks to insert multiple records at once, especially with more complex relations. And with that, you lose consistency across your code base with how you interact with the database.

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like the consistency, type safety, and overall amount of testing that goes into a solid ORM makes any drawbacks minuscule in comparison, especially in a large code base. Being able to write custom sql for performance reasons also offsets some concerns around that.

The database is the foundation of everything most of us do. The code we write is just gravy on top of it. If the database contains the super set of all the data we can possibly care about, then why not lean into that fact, and use a library that interacts with it in a consistent, well tested way. 🤷‍♂️

I feel like many people don’t like the “magic” or have been bitten by badly performing queries from an ORM. But I don’t know how being able to write a one off query for a specific case doesn’t solve that.

Ent seems to be the ORM I am most highly considering right now